Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

“Yes,” said Aunt Alice, “too late to save your friend but not too late to be saved by him, to have his pagan confessional heart lodged in your breast.”

Her shadow had solidified. She seemed suddenly to become a divine gossip — how else may I describe it? — of heaven. “Do you know, Everyman,” she said to Masters, “that he’s still toiling away at his precious ‘charisma of the law’ theorem?”

“That was the main plank in his defence of the red prince,” said Masters. “I recall how passionate he was — the law is valid, he said, indispensable, even in Purgatory and hell, not to speak of heaven — but because of territorial imperatives, absolute or rigid frontiers above and below (on sea, land, in the air), there is a hideous charisma, a moribund authoritarian fixture of emotion that bars or excludes even as it confines peoples. Moribund it may be, he declared, but in actual practice it remains terrifyingly constant and it underpins all liberal codes — even those liberal codes that attempt to argue sensibly that security is mutual, never one-sided.”

“Ah yes,” said Aunt Alice Bartleby, “if I were allowed, my dear, to take you up and through the ladder, I would show you where he sits writing day and night. Sometimes I find him arguing with a judge, the shadow of a judge, who assumes all sorts of shapes. Sometimes the judge looks like young Weyl, the son judges the father. It’s too absurd! It’s a dream. It’s amazing. His own son sitting there with Amaryllis.” Aunt Alice was laughing and weeping, I thought.

“Sometimes,” she said sombrely, “he plays the scene of his death all over again. Like a kind of cosmic cinema. Why, bless my heart, there he is now. He’s descended the ladder! He’s playing the scene. Look! There’s the newspaper cyclist. There’s the ancient donkey or horse or mule, the wheel, the cart.”

There he was indeed. I saw him, my father. I could see him through the bars of the ladder, even through Aunt Alice Bartleby’s solid, gesticulating, crumbling shadow. It was as if an unforeseen rumbling of the law made itself manifest in his advocacy of a pagan body. His frame, his chest, was suddenly rent before my eyes to illumine savage unconscious realms in which the innocent advocate pays for the guilty court he addresses. Was he falling — as the wheel caught him — through the ladder of the sky from a murdered aeroplane to illumine territorial charisma he had sought to unravel, had he been shot to ribbons under the divinity of the sea’s ladder to illumine Carnival bandages, had he been crushed on a battlefield to illumine a mask of shell?

He had paid the price for deliberating upon territorial imperatives to an indifferent, largely insensible court. He had become the savage hollow he sought to explicate and unravel. He had been broken on the wheel. He had trespassed beyond conventional pavements into the traffic of deadly highways. Or so it seemed to me as I contemplated Masters on his chain that wound itself into many worlds, past, present and to be.

My father had defended a pagan El Doradan whose hideous imperatives could be traced far up, far back, into ancient fires when statesmen-priests broke the organ in their victims’ chest and offered it to the sun or — should the sun fail — to unknown fires far out in space, to foetal plants around Vega.

Such charisma, he argued, had survived within the civilization of twentieth-century age as the reverberating shock of pagan body-ritual of which we were oblivious. Witness our predilection for black-out Carnival and games of nuclear holocaust we have played with computers, with robots, fallen numbers, surviving numbers, underground caves. And thus it was not to be wondered at that humanity, in its subconscious or unconscious advocacy of the body as fodder for the State, was articulating an ancient ritual dressed up in the vestments of purist obsession; it was not to be wondered at that societies were suicidal and accident-prone, and that even those who wrestled to enlighten us with parallel formations fell asleep and stumbled under Christ’s Trojan donkey or resurrection mule.

Christ’s Trojan donkey! What a parallel! Could one bear the shock of such a parallel, I wondered? Could such a parallel bring a new beast, a new heart, a new love, upon which to ride …? Was this my father’s gift, the gift of the beast he dreamt he entered the moment he fell under shadow and hoof?

In an accident-prone, suicidal and conflict-ridden age, violence is a savage masquerade, is it not? It feeds on a void of sacrament and on the infliction of humiliation and shadow. It not only feeds on these but remains blind to the pressures to which it is addicted.

“I know, I know,” said Aunt Alice Bartleby. “I see massacres on earth when I look through the bars of heaven, so many pathetic bodies.”

“What has all this to do with Weyl and me?” Masters demanded. He knew the answer but it was difficult to shoulder such terrible knowledge, that an equation existed between Christ’s pagan donkey and the human beast of love upon which the universe rides.

He touched his own body, his own beast. It seemed to reflect the rent in Weyl’s frame. He had used labouring men and women in his plantation, overseering days as beasts of burden. But the heart of the beast was now his. Weyl had given it to him to pass on to me within the golden chain of existence. It was his, it would renew him, it would save him, imbue him with unbearable and bearable insights as time rode on his back.

“If you see that, my dear Masters, a spiritual evolution in the law may suddenly thrust you into the stars, as into the labyrinth of the Earth, to plumb the equation between fire and fire. If you cannot see it, or plumb it, accidents will pile up everywhere around you. For those accidents are your soul that remains oblivious of its parallel heritages and weeps with a thousand eyes on every battlefield, on every roadway.

“Unless you see yourself as paradoxically enriched by savage pathos, savage dream, you cannot break the spell of motiveless crime, you cannot overcome Hades, you cannot see God.”

*

Early in December, apparently fully recovered — new mystical “savage heart” lodged in his body from Weyl’s rent side and resurrection mule — Masters telephoned the factory in North London and discovered that his West Indian colleagues had been transferred to day shift. He felt he should visit them and say goodbye.

It was curious to reflect, I thought, upon the chain of being through life into death and back again and the necessity for a revisualized chain in the dead king of whom I dreamt and whose steps I had retraced into childhood light year in parallel with the ancient game of the crab. I heard again the mysterious voice that had addressed him and me a moment ago, saying this time, “In El Doradan light-year crab the spirit or half-obliterated cosmic pattern cries out to be completed or fulfilled, cries from the other side of the womb or death-in-life. Cries to be reborn or resurrected. Such rebirth or resurrection is a mystery that resides in parallel shapes and riddles.”

Through the chain of being I began to treasure the commingling of elements in the marriage of Earth and sky, and thus I was able to visualize something I may only describe as “phenomenal resurrection”, healed character, enveloping Masters when he returned for the last time to the factory.

I dreamt the rain ceased the morning he set out on a bus from Notting Hill Gate, but everywhere the light seemed to drip into overcast translucency, mutated silver, mutated pearl. Space within the dead, resurrected king and space without him and me was diffuse, it was a web draping the bare, sculpted branches of trees. The conjunction of inner and outer space was a token of healed hollow or recovery from depression, from illness.